Description

The Law and Society Conference is an annual event that brings together academics, researchers and postgraduate students from around Australia and abroad for the purpose of examining many facets of the relationships between laws and legal institutions, and citizens and communities. From 13 - 15 December 2005 the conference will be held in Wollongong, New South Wales, and hosted by the Legal Intersections Research Centre. Approximately 120 researchers from a wide range of academic disciplines are expected to attend the conference.

Globally, nationally and locally, law has been mobilized to provide "security" and "certainty" in the face of "fear" and "risk".

Who needs law's protection? Who does law protect?

Does law need protection from political abuses?

Can we restore law to a rightful place in the social? Did it ever have one?

Our aim is to scrutinise the variety of contexts in which vulnerable individuals and groups (including refugees, religious minorities, Indigenous peoples, victims of crime) seek the protection of the law, and to assess the quality of protection that law actually affords.

The Organising Committee has decided to adopt ‘connecting law, legal institutions and local communities’ as a major ancillary theme of the conference. Consistent with this theme, we plan to incorporate a number of events into the conference program which provide members of the broader community with opportunities to share their past experiences and future expectations of law in its role as ‘protector’.

Socio-legal scholars are invited to propose papers, panels or other events, related to the main conference theme, or on other 'law and society' topics.

Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to participate

Authors of papers on the main conference theme will be invited to submit their papers to be considered for publication in a special issue of the journal 'law text culture' in 2007.